The XMEN Clan Forums

I've been looking at putting a distro on my machine. I'll probably go with Gentoo or maybe ubuntu. Anyways...

I'm looking to see if people use the window managers that come with the distro, or if they're using something else? Say Enlightenment or possibly one of the many others out there.

I was looking over the Gentoo site and saw the screen shots of enlightenment in use on one of the users' desktops. I liked the clean look. But I've never tried it, and it is still in development.

Any thoughts? Suggestions?

Tried enlightenment. Pretty cool looking, but I found it farily awkward to do a lot of things, likely due to the beta nature of the thing. It's still installed so I can switch over to it if I feel like it, but I don't very often.

I've found that I like KDE these days. Didn't used to, but it's improved a lot. I think it's got better faster than Gnome has. I've not used many others, other than brief exposure during live CD use or whatever. Did a little custom code for Blackbox, once.

I liked KDE when I had mandrake installed. But gawd was it slow sometimes!

Er, enlightenment pays a price for the gee-whiz cool stuff, too. All depends on what you turn on. KDE certainly was bad, and it's suffered some bloat, but some optimization, too.

So in a KDE vs Enlightenment match, is it more of a user-interface and usefulness thing that KDE wins out on?

They've talked about a code rewrite of Enlightenment as well. I don't know how well along that is (can only get a copy from CVS at the moment). KDE has several years of work behind it too.


Hmm... might as well try it out.

They're pretty different. KDE stands for "K Desktop Environment." The environment part is a whole big set of function libraries to make programming applications easier. Think Windows API. Gnome is a similar thing. Both have a bunch of little helper applications that are or almost are part of the environment itself, and normal applications that use their libraries. KDE also has some suite-level programs like KOffice. A full set of K apps is a lot of bloat. I don't know offhand of any suite-level software for Gnome.

Enlightenment doesn't have as much of the environment about it - not sure how much is by design and how much is because of its lack of maturity. Some libraries do exist, but for now it's mostly just the way the desktop and file managers look and feel.